Ang Lee’s Epic Adventure: Life of Pi

Life of Pi, based on the Booker-winning adventure novel by Yann Martel, is a holiday ornament of a movie: whimsical, pretty, family-friendly, and, depending on your taste and mood, perhaps a little much. When the zookeeper parents of Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel (the newcomer Suraj Sharma), a bookish sixteen-year-old in French India, relocate the family to Canada, they do it on a trans-Pacific cargo ship, with a complement of animals in tow. There is a storm; the ship sinks; Pi makes it out alive, along with a short-lived group of animals and Richard Parker (a tiger, not the left-of-center economic pundit). Richard Parker seems to want a slice of Pi, and so the boy cobbles together the available resources—a few rations, some spare life vests, and oars—to construct a floating sidecar, out of the cat’s reach. Thus situated, he suffers through a long trip on the planet’s vastest ocean, always wondering whether he will find his way back to shore.

We know he will, because Life of Pi, like Martel’s book, is narrated in flashback by an older Pi (Irrfan Khan), now alive and well and living in Canada. Would this be a more engrossing movie if a happy ending weren’t constantly in sight? At times, the film seems to drag more narrative machinery than its foregone conclusion can bear. (It doesn’t help that a Martel-like figure, played by Rafe Spall, exists in the movie mainly as a sort of semi-verbal mannequin, guiding us though the shipwreck-and-tiger story in the guise of “interviewing” Old Pi with solicitous attention. His pert credulity before a stranger is, in certain ways, the most incredible thing in the film.)

Life of Pi is directed by Ang Lee, best known for his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, and its chief delight, not too surprisingly, is visual: Lee deploys the sea and maritime horizon in the way that Hans Hofmann used his color planes. (He filmed the movie in 3-D, presumably to intensify these effects—though viewers may wonder whether watching large animals be seasick in three dimensions amid the woozy churnings of the mid-Pacific counts as an enhanced experience.) Even Lee’s stormy gray landscapes are richly rendered, but this indulgence has a downside, and his story sometimes suffers from an overbuffed, emotionally deadened care. (It may be telling that the film’s most heartrending moment comes not from its scripted actors but in a fleeting expression from the orangutan, looking out toward the place where the submerged ship claimed her son.) For those with tolerance for its drifting middle sections and high quotient of treacle, though, Life of Pi is a castaway epic in the old mold, a wide-audience adventure film that stays afloat.